Author: bjukuri

  • Living Alive

    The word comfortable is a word that will not always speak the truth, it will not say as much about the surrounding reality, but rather your state of being.

    How do I explain being comfortable in a dysfunctional home, to be surrounded by stress and pain and be at ease and pain free?

    As I dug around in my past, in my feelings and in my head, I discovered that the only way was to deny myself.

    I looked up the word denial, but this time I seen it from my point of view, from the self.

    Denial… A refusal to comply with or satisfy a request.

    I never denied the other person or request, but I denied myself.

    I was comfortable denying myself, not looking at myself and instead used myself to make others happy. I knew that girl.

    I was comfortable in my role and in knowing what she had to do, I looked at the other and what they needed and complied.

    I never looked at me as me, or me alone. I was a very comfortable not looking at me. I could only see me as what I was for other people, there was no me alone.

    In a dysfunctional, incestual home, in a place where you are hurt, it is best to not look at yourself, it is best to become absent of self.

    Imagine I was comfortable without a self in the midst of being surrounded by pain, stress, and anxiety. I had to deny my feelings in order to stay there, and I did.

    Being self less is denying any request of the self. I was shut down to hearing or feeling my self.

    I had no connection to me, the lines were severed, I was pain free, for I was so disconnected.

    Comfortably unattached.

    When I became attached to the truths of my life, then discomfort met me, and my comfortable detachment disappeared.

    My security blanket was to keep me separated from my life and the truth that lay beneath.

    Denial kept me comfortable.

    Isn’t it amazing that denial is comfortable? Denial of self allows you to stand among uncomfortable people and places… you simply don’t bring your feelings or knowing there, you leave your self to be there.

    As I sat there in wistfulness of missing the old me, the part I missed was their reception of me, how they received me, not how I wasn’t there.

    What I know now is that they don’t like it when I bring me, when I have requests and when I don’t comply, they only want the me that doesn’t have a me there.

    They want me to be without a self.

    A self less me, to leave my self behind, to come without her…

    I don’t leave home without her…now.

    The differences in the way I live now compared to the way I lived before is with me or without me.

    Before I wasn’t there, did not exist, was living a few feet behind my life, numb shut down unaware.

    The new me is alive and aware and right here, feeling and dealing in this now moment, no longer denying her inner requests.

    The striking differences between living a life with a self inside, to hear her voice, to make her choice, compared to living a life without her, is an ocean of difference, it is like living dead or living alive.

  • Discovered the real me.

    I listened once again to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking to Oprah about her stroke and how she lost all contact to the person she was before the stroke and was left as an infant in a woman’s body, unknowing who she was.

    What struck me were the differences between the two Jills and how I can relate having lived as two of me.

    We both like our second self much better than the first and it took her eight years to grow her second self, and then parts of her old self memories filtered in, but by then a whole new her was in its place.

    My experience wasn’t quite so dramatic physically, I didn’t have to re-learn how to walk, talk, read and write, but my self -identity was equally destroyed, my past all a fraud.

    The me I thought I was wasn’t real and the real me was nowhere and I had to get myself away from the false relationships and places that abused me.

    My healing relied on me walking away from family.

    Her mother came and mothered her a second time and fully embraced her where she was, an infant who needed to be taught all over again. They mourned the loss of her first self, but never expected the second one to be like the first, but a new Jill.

    While they had a second mother and daughter relationship…my mother and I went our separate ways.

    In fact my new self and wellness depended upon whether I could separate myself from my family of origin, the family who created the false files.

    My old self drew its energy and life from being in the old relationships and in doing all the old behaviors and my new healthy self emerged from walking away.

    The tricky spot I was left standing in, was that I knew the old self, and yet the old self was built upon lies, and I had no clue of the new self, but the new self depended upon me walking away from all that I knew.

    I had to learn how I grew wrong to then grow correctly the second time.

    My whole world crashed around me, and my left hemisphere (the storyteller of who you are) was all wrong and it led me to cling to the right hemisphere where intuition, nature, being, now, artistic, and pictures lived.

    While she didn’t understand words, I didn’t trust them.

    Dr. Jill spent 8 years connecting back to the Left side and I have spent 6 years disconnecting from files that were all wrong and then filling them with new contents or meanings.

    I find it interesting what I have learned from her stroke experience, how the brain works and where the self lives.

    What I feel makes a great self is when you occupy the right side most of the time and use the left to communicate.
    We both learned that we couldn’t live unattached to the left side, even though the left side was so damaged, we had to bring it back in order to live whole.

    Somehow hearing Dr. Jill speak of never expecting the second self to appear like the first, took away an unconscious fighting that had been going on within me that it was almost adultery to accept the new me, like I was cheating on the old self.

    My love of my old self and my love of the new self were at odds…it has taken me time to get used to loving the new me, while unloving the old me, if that makes sense?

    There is a wistfulness at times when I struggle to do what my new self needs, a wanting the comfort of being used to this new self.

    While I see my husband in new eyes, it isn’t him, but the eyes looking upon him.

    It is strange to have a new me in an old life and to feel the new self being rejected in places the old self was accepted and it is harder to find confidence in the new self’s love.

    This self loves differently, this self sees differently, this self believes differently.

    This self was grown from the wisdom that my first self experienced.

    I would not be the woman I am today, if I hadn’t lived as the first self first.

    As I learned how she grew to be that way, I discovered the real me.

  • Standing Strong.

    “If you recognize the UNreal with any sincerity in your heart, you need not look for the real.” (Mooji)

    What a simple idea to recognize the unreal…and yet I was born onto parents who were unreal, so my real was unreal and there was no place to find real.

    My parents lived their lives hiding their real and so we lived hiding our real, in fact our religion had the perfect tool we could use to hide real, it was called forgiviness of sins.

    These sins then are no longer part of us, they became unreal and our real is minus all sins.

    The real you has no sins…you have repented and handed them over to Jesus, so you can remain whiter than snow and your sins have been washed away.

    Anything that was dark or off color could be washed away.

    I lived in this washed out world of unreality.

    It was washed so many times, you lost sight of what was real and what was unreal. In fact the real you had to keep forgiving to make it unreal.

    I am not sure you can follow along, but the main theme of my childhood religion was to keep forgiving all that wasn’t right, and in doing so made it right once again.

    In this fluid ever changing landscape nothing real ever stayed real long enough, I lived thoroughly in a moveable reel.

    Incredible the way this works for the deviant.

    In fact I was raised to believe so much in the magical power of forgivenss of sins that no reality was ever too great to forgive, to make right again.

    Most will concentrate on the feelings of forgiveness but not in the actual application of it.

    To apply forgiveness is to wash away an action you have done, it leaves you standing as if it never happened.

    Where does this sin go?
    How does it magically not be part of you anymore?
    Can you literally delete that part of yourself?

    My childhood religion concentrated highly on forgiveness and did have sins as well, but it was the application of applying forgiveness upon the unsightly deeds that created havoc in my world.

    For it allowed all kinds of behaviors that were harmful for a child.

    My incredulousness of this leaves me with no words.

    For I lived 46 years in unreality that they taught me to create.

    My mother’s strengths come from this religion and my father needed this magical wand to return him to being whiter than snow after raping little girls.

    It isn’t the reality of what I endured, but the unreality.

    How insane the ideology of this religion is…how it works incredibly well for the rapist and is extremely unaffective for those of us who have been raped.

    What did it do for me?

    Did it undo my rape or did it make me have to make whiter than snow a rapist, make a pedophile a father?

    There are two sides of all things, and when you see the application of a sin being erased from the sinner, it doesn’t show you how it feels as one who was sinned upon.

    As my father was heaven bound and cleaner than the white driven snow, I was left in hell, dirty and untreated.

    I was left with a father who hurts and who is forgiven by a multitude of Knowing adults.

    Knowing adults who can change a rapist back into a father with a few words, “Your sins are all forgiven in Jesus name and precious blood.”

    And he is once again set upon Heavens path.

    And where am I?

    What magical words can you say to me, to heal me, to make me whiter than snow? Where are your words for me?

    I am speaking for all the ones who have been sinned upon.
    Who are left with the affects of the sin, who go untreated.

    Untreated is to go without the truth being lived out.

    Untreated is to not make real that which is real.

    We are forced to live in unreality when you bless away that which is real.

    Imagine taking away that which is real from a child…

    Making them live in the make belief world.

    My whole childhood was based upon make belief things, creating a wonderful fantasy land.

    It has taken me six years so far to recognize the unreal and it falls away and all that I get left with is the real.

    What I know for sure is that real cannot be blessed away, it remains standings strong.

  • The Sun

    Let the minutes show that I’m here, that I braved a none-to-happy childhood; legal drugs; illegal drugs;organized religion; disorganized religion; toothaches, stomach-aches, the occasional headache, plenty of heartache; the death of my father; the death of my mother, the death of my infant son; three marriages, two divorces, and a long and utterly impractical love affair with myself.

    (this appeared in The Sun’s April Issue- Sy Safransky’s Notebook)

  • Not the Tail…

    When one person in a relationship changes, the relationship changes, for you are asked to adjust yourself. We are like two moving puzzle pieces that keep losing their shapes and we have to move and work to fit back together.

    I have felt the nerve of my security and found that it is based on sameness.

    It likes looking at the sameness; it likes to see itself in others and is fearful around different views and actions…it gets nervous.

    My security nerve feels more secure when the other person acts, thinks and moves like me, it wants a mirror image, it feel secure there.

    When a person moves in a different direction, I feel they are hearing differently than I, perhaps tuned into a different radio station, and dancing to a completely different song.

    My history on group movement, and being so alike, has made my security nerve accustomed to a bunch of people moving like a flock of birds, and it feels uneasy with independent movement.

    This is good to know, that it isn’t that the actions so much that is off, but how I perceive it.

    When you are raised to fit into a group and live nestled in that group, it is really odd to separate and live as a single.

    A single amongst the many…

    An individual doesn’t make you alone; it makes you a single in the bunch of many, a unique expression of humanity.

    My security nerve is okay with me being unique, however, it does seem to register changes within others as well.

    If the changes are empowering and heading towards whole being, I am okay…and actually feel a lift as I cheer them on…but if the changes are someone losing their power, I feel the drain as well.

    My security nerve has to fully separate and become its own, and stop being so co-dependent upon another’s power source.

    My wiring seems to get twisted up, it surges or fails when my boundary between self and other get blurred.

    Where my sense of self leaves my body and is attached inside of another, in one point two seconds, I am clinging to their feelings to find mine.

    When my power of security relies on another, I fail for I am plugged into them and their actions for my peace of mind, and this is insanity.

    This is how I know that a part of me is still co-dependent, for I feel unsettled by your actions, I feel my power surging or failing; I feel the pull and ebb as you move.

    It is incredible and yet frightening to feel the tail of the dog, and not being the dog.

    When I am the tail I have no power, I go where you go and either wag or droop…but can’t steer.

    Life is completely different when you are the dog and not the tail…

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  • My Natural State.

    What struck me as I wrote about the Unbelievers verses the Believers is that we all breathe air and we all have the same bodies, our only striking differences are what we believe, or the thoughts in our heads.

    I had just heard Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking on Sirius and she made reference to the genetic similarities of humanity that I would love to share.

    (My Stroke of Insight)

    “Biological evolution generally occurs from a stat of lesser complexity to a state of greater complexity. Nature ensures her own efficiency by not reinventing the wheel with every new species she creates. Generally, once nature identifies a pattern in the genetic code that works towards the survival of the creature, like a blossom for nectar transmission, a heart to pump blood, a sweat gland to help regulate body temperature or an eyeball for vision, she tends to build that feature into future permutations of that specific code. By adding a new level of programming on top of an already well-established set of instructions, each new species contains a strong foundation of time-tested DNA sequences. This is one of the simple ways through which nature transmits the experience and wisdom bestowed by ancient life to her progeny.

    Another advantage of this type of build-on-top-of-what-already-works genetic engineering strategy is that very small manipulations of the genetic sequencing can result in major revolutionary transformations. In our genetic profile, believe it or not, scientific evidence indicates that we humans share 99.4% of our total DNA sequences with the chimpazee.

    This does not mean, of course, that humans are direct descendants from our tree-swinging friends, but it does emphasize that the genius of our molecular code is supported by eons of nature’s greatest evolutionary effort. Our human code was not a random act, at least not in its entirety, but rather is better construed as nature’s ever-evolving quest for a body of genetic perfection.

    As members of the same human species, you and I share all but 0.01% (1/100th of 1%) of identical genetic sequences. So biologically, as a species, you and I are virtually identical to one another at the level of our genes (99.9%). Looking around at the diversity within our human race, it is obvious that 0.01% accounts for a significant difference in how we look, think and behave.
    Dr. Jill

    What I find so interesting is that we are so alike yet so different in our responses to life, and what we are taught to believe makes a huge difference in how we live.

    Our bodies have similar genetic make up, yet how these bodies experience life is much more dictated by who raised us and their personal beliefs.

    It is very interesting to me to learn about why you live life the way you live it. I always say, I am perfect coming from whence I came. I simply couldn’t have known no better, being taught what I was taught, either by word or deed.

    I am a perfect rendition of a person who traveled as I traveled.

    What I awoke to in December 2004 was the realization that I had no independent beliefs or even person.

    I thought as one part of a big mind controlled religion, my mind wasn’t mine to own.

    What actually woke up in that moment was the awareness of how little of me was actually mine.

    I told my brother today, all I owned in that moment was my breath.

    All the rest seemed to be tainted from the abuse or the religion, there wasn’t a part of me that was free, but my breath.

    I stayed with my breath. I trusted nature and walked with it, seeking its natural independence. Nature became my teacher in learning how to be me.

    Slowly I am returning to my natural state.

  • Unbelievers Live Free.

    In my old religion, those who left the church or perhaps those who never entered were called Unbelievers.

    These Unbelievers didn’t believe like we did, and in doing so didn’t move about the planet like us. They were ‘allowed’ to do things that good Believers were not allowed to do.

    Unbelievers were easy to spot, they had pierced ears, painted fingernails, colored hair, they were allowed to do things with their bodies we were not allowed to do.

    Unbelievers also had a say in how many children they would have, or if they wanted any. They had freedoms in their lives we didn’t have.

    You could almost see the Believers being stuck and the Unbelievers being free.

    It all began and ended with my mind.

    When I believed my mind, its thoughts and its beliefs, I gave up my body and my free will. When I didn’t believe, when I became an Unbeliever, I had my freedom back.

    It resembles an addiction in how it takes over your life.

    My mind became addicted to limiting thoughts.

    What is so extremely debilitating is how we are afraid to not believe those thoughts, for those thoughts were taught to us from a very young age.

    The thoughts and beliefs become who we are, and to let them go seems to be killing yourself.

    Being held prisoner in your own life by thoughts is being the jailer and the jailed.

    You have to become an Unbeliever to be set free.

    We were taught; Unbelievers go to Hell, so who wants to be free only to spend eternity in Hell.

    Isn’t there a saying “What is bound on Earth is bound in Heaven”?

    Being bound on earth is how I lived for the first 46 years of my life, being a good Believer of a very mind controlling religion.

    Becoming unbound has been a long process and one that has brought me much peace, love and joy…

    Unbelieving is unraveling the ties that bind.

    Unbelievers live free.

  • Mold in sight.

    What I didn’t know about writing is that you are supposed to have a plan first, a graph, a map, an idea, an outline, something for the words to fall into, that you don’t just stand there empty handed and catching them as they fall.

    I felt like a neglectful writer, unskilled, untaught and uncaring, yet as I step back and see the overview, I am astonished how hard most writers make it.

    It seems they are trying to predict the unpredictable, like trying to control reality, or planning for an unknown future.

    As I look upon my first 46 years of living, I had structure, I had rules of a religion to follow, and I had to fit into that, foregoing all my instincts and passion.

    My natural spiritual self was whittled down to fit into their mold.

    My mother sculpted this mold, and we had to squeeze ourselves into the walls, making sure we didn’t jut out unbecomingly.

    Our goal was to replicate this mold and make our children to conform to look the same, sound the same, and walk the same, little molds of sameness.

    Kept to the outside were words that didn’t match this mind set, this ideology and beyond their very rigid lines danced wonderful words and ideas in a field of pure potential…forbidden to us congregants.

    We had to disregard all things that didn’t match the mold, and by doing so passed up 99.9% of reality…and lived with .1% of our self.

    This .1% of me is where I began writing from, asking how I had sold so much of myself off and what did I truly believe coming from the base of me.

    From the base of me I ask the question and have no rules as to what comes, or where it takes me, what conclusion we draw, what systems we debunk, there is nothing off limits, there are no walls between me and my words.

    In fact I am tearing down the parts of me that have been crammed into the tight space, and giving life again to the long forgotten parts of me.

    There just simply can’t be a grid to follow, for I have no idea who I am, where I am going or what my purpose is…writing is helping me define who I am.

    I am meeting my words with a blank slate and they are coming from the mold of extreme restriction, so they too are excited not having to guard themselves and their truths.

    We are the clay and the sculptor with no pattern or mold in sight…

  • An Artist with words.

    I have been going to writing classes, listening as Authors speak of their writing techniques and style, it seems they all know what their pattern is called and how it works, and I have yet to hear one who writes like me.

    My words come barreling out, pushing and shoving each other; they are not at all concerned about style and land on the page happy to be free from my tangled mine.

    They are driven by confusion and fear mostly, and feel much better on a clear white paper, all sorted out and explained.

    My writing starts usually with a thread or a nagging and often times a sinking feeling, and it matters not to me or the words how they look after we are done explaining.

    They are all bunched up in my head, running over each other, truths buried beneath the piles of fearful thoughts, overrun with uprooted beliefs and all are wanting the space to sort themselves out.

    A place where they can line up and be seen and felt, acknowledged and labeled correctly, room for separating truth from fiction.

    They are in a hurry and are reckless, heedless to watching where they land and how. Haphazardly flopped they care less about how they look as long as they are felt properly.

    As a writer I have failed in the eyes of the writing teachers, for I have not followed any proven path, but set out on my own and let my words land as they may, letting them be the creators not I.

    It truly puzzles me how they can know ahead what the words are going to need, how they can have in mind the structure that they will use to express themselves, like map writing, they seem to know where the words are going.

    My words are like vagabonds wandering around or riots of revolting feelings; it would be nearly impossible to know ahead of time where they are going, let alone draw a map ahead of time.

    Perhaps my words and self-expression have been tied up in the dark for too long; guarded, restrained and held in strict beliefs and ideas, that we are not willing to succumb to lying down nicely, instead we run wild in expressive freedom.

    Maybe I am not a writer at all, but an artist with words.

  • Turning Bad to Good.

    On the sliding scale of normal, I lived on the high end up near the top. I was pushed up there by fear and fear stood between the middle ground and me.

    My hyper responses seem normal, unless you compare them to another’s; they seemed natural in their unnaturalness.

    It literally feels like I am being put in harms way to forge into the middle responses, like they are too weak for my security.

    My security calls for over the top measures, I do not trust middle ground.

    Middle ground appears as doing nothing, is standing still, is allowing, is not knowing what your playing with, it seems pointless and weak.

    And perhaps what I call middle ground is the bottom rung called nothing, the very opposite of where I lived.

    It seemed my scales of normal had two responses, hyper screaming or nothing. Middle was nowhere to be found.

    I had to crawl through fear and let go of where I was in order to be introduced to reasonable.

    What is reasonable?

    Balancing on the razor edge of reason feels like a weak position to my hyper vigilant self.

    The space that is needed is what Stephen Covy writes about in his book, The 8th Habit. The space between a life incident and your response. He says that the space is almost non-existent for an abused person; we have no space before we react.

    What he calls space I will call reason. We are left without reason.

    We enter into a life changing moment without reason.

    We can’t be reasonable, for we don’t have reason.

    We can’t find a reason and we don’t’ look for it. We react without reasons.

    This may sound very peculiar to some, but what I felt was that the situation is what drove me up the tree, like a fearful raccoon; little did I know I lived there and beckoned it to come to me.

    I reacted from there. I brought in the high hyper energy, it wasn’t the scene that spewed it forth, it came from me, I elevated the situation as high above middle as I was.

    Instead of meeting the situation, I brought it up the tree with me.

    In order to find reason, I had to lower myself down.

    What an odd view I had of myself lowering my energy, letting go of my fear, and climbing slowly down towards middle and not dropping all the way to nothing, but to sit in a place of reason. To meet the situation where it is.

    Reason. I had to look up the meaning.

    n. The basis or motive for an action, decision, or conviction.

    It is interesting to see that Reason is the basis or motive for how we act or the decisions we make.

    I had reason, I had many reasons and all my reasons were fearful reasons.

    It was reasonable for me to be so high up the scale of normal.

    I read that Fear is False Events Appearing Real.

    If Fear believed in what isn’t real, you would think we would naturally turn to what is real.

    But what if what is real is horrifying?

    What if you have to give up father for a pedophile?
    Then what?

    My lessons letting go of false events was to grab on to much more scarier things.

    Yet I believe this is why most hang on to fantasy, to what isn’t, to build up a wall of fear, a wall of false events, false ideas, a fairyland between them and reality.

    What is so sad, is that you think by not dealing you are keeping the boogie man at bay, and what you are actually doing is creating a cage for you all to be together.

    It was like I lived in the highest tree in the cage, for fear of what lay at my feet.

    It is incredible the wall of fear we build out of false ideals…and we don’t want to drop the pretty curtain to reveal who really lives with us.

    And imagine, we think fear is about something scary, when fear most often is putting pretty masks on scary things.

    Fear is make up, a pretend mask on a bad behavior or person. Fear is making up a fantasy.

    Who knew that fear was creating things that were not real?

    Fear is to a make up story.

    What I had thought, was that fear was about something scary, I failed to understand the application of fear.

    Fear is building a false event or story and the unease I believe is the body knowing the truth that lay beneath.

    The body trembles in the false events appearing real.

    What also occurred to me, we rarely make up scary stories about good things. We make up wonderful, kind and loving stories about scary things.

    Interesting fear is turning bad to good.

    A friend passed on a quote she found on an Art Quilt made by Tina Koyama, “Beyond the four walls of fear is all of life’s energy waiting for me.”